When you live in New Mexico, September may be the hardest month to find turns. But just north of Santa Fe, outside Alamosa Colorado, a skier’s oasis exists year round. 
Recently, my wife and I headed to Colorado for some early fall hiking. We spent the day scrambling up Mt. Shivano, a local fourteener near Salida. We summited close to 10am amidst a healthy snow squall: for us, the first snowstorm of the season. But it was rain in the valley below that excited us most. In our car our ski equipment waited and the steep slopes of the Great Sand Dune National Park were getting soaking wet, hard, and fast.
That evening we traveled to the National Park and watched the sand dunes turn golden yellow from the setting sun just as the rainstorm passed. We loaded our backpacks with ski equipment and wished we had remembered the headlamps for the evening hike.
Soon enough, the inky blackness of night set in as the storm’s remnants blanketed the moon. The hiking was slow but simple. Even with no moonlight, the lack of trees to navigate, rocks to scramble, and snow to post-hole made climbing up the hard packed ridgeline straightforward. On either side of us, the dunes slipped away into blackness. With no landmarks below the pitch seemed to hold endless potential.
We reached what appeared to be the top of a large ridgeline when the full moon slowly emerged and we caught our first glimpse of the terrain below. Like a silent winter snowscape, the sand appeared soft and pillowly in the milky moonlight. Like an untracked powder hillside, it beckoned.
With storm clouds threatening to squelch our moonlit shining sand, we sprayed our skis with Armor All for glide, jumped into our ski boots, and pointed them down hill. With a bit of a running start we kicked down into the inky, cool abyss. Momentum overwhelmed the sandy friction and we plunged down the dune sliding into the dark.
Soft and deep it was not. Nonetheless, the hard-packed sand allowed us to gather enough speed to make a solid dozen turns. I came to a grinding halt as the slope petered out and turned to watch my wife lay down “grainy” eights across my tracks. There was nothing artificial about these turns. Acceleration. Edge. Sandy grit blew in my face like dry powder. This was skiing in September.
Filed under: Backcountry Skis, Having Fun Outdoors, Interesting Events, Mountain Shop
